Our Top 10 Favourite Apps of 2018

Last year we hit some pretty important milestones: We more than doubled the number of visitors to our site, we grew our email list by thousands of subscribers, we added more products to our roster, we sold even more to more customers, and we grew engagement and follower numbers on our social channels. All of this growth was earned by the daily hustle and grind we put into our business but what made it faster and more efficient was doing it with the right apps. The best business apps make for better businesses, so we’re sharing our own list of the best business apps we’ve used throughout the last year.

We’re no stranger to great business apps around here, in fact, we talk about them regularly:

But these ten apps are the best of the best which we are currently using.

Some of the apps that made this list are tried and true business apps we swear by and can’t live without, others are apps we discovered within the last year and don’t know how we ever worked without them.

So if you like to keep your finger on the pulse of the best business apps on the market or if you’re interested in learning about new ways to run your ecommerce business better, then check out this roundup of the best business apps for ecommerce entrepreneurs.

Best Business Apps for Ecommerce #1: Klaviyo

This year we prioritized our email list and put our time and energy into using resources that would make it better, faster, more beautiful, and even more optimized. A healthy email list is an active email list and an active email list is one of the most valuable outlets an ecommerce store can have access to.

Part of cleaning up our email list included moving over to a more powerful email marketing service which meant migrating over to Klaviyo. They’re recognized as being the email marketing app that businesses use when they want to level up their email marketing campaigns and their long list of features is a testament to that.

What makes them so powerful is that you can customize email marketing campaigns to suit your needs, whether you have a small list of email subscribers you like to send personalized campaigns to or you’re a growth-focused business that needs an email marketing solution that can scale with you.

What We Love About Klaviyo

We love that anything we could ever want in an email marketing software is in Klaviyo. It integrates with our shopping cart so we can directly connect our subscribers to their customer profile, we can segment our email list subscribers in any way we want to, we can track website visitors as they move around our site so we can target visitors who haven’t browsed recently, we can personalized emails beyond just using subscribers’ first names, and we can create automated emails or in-the-moment campaigns whenever we see fit. We also experience more consistent delivery and better open rates when using Klaviyo which makes a huge difference to our traffic and sales.

Best Business Apps for Ecommerce #2: Help Scout

Although we’re a small team, we pride ourselves on maintaining a positive rapport with our audience by responding to customer service inquiries as quickly as possible. No customer interaction is too small and we like to keep things as personal as possible while also keeping things running as efficiently as possible.

To keep on top of things, we use Help Scout so we can keep tabs on all our conversations, assign emails to the right people in our team, respond to our audience on a first-come-first-served basis, and organize open conversations in our inbox so they never get lost or buried. Help Scout makes email management much less daunting and it makes it easier for us to keep on top of even throughout our busiest times of the year.

What We Love About Help Scout

Overall, Help Scout makes working as a team within one inbox super simple. No one steps on anyone’s toes because we can view who’s responding to which conversations, we can choose to forward emails to our personal inboxes so we can monitor what kind of customer support tickets are coming in and out, and we use the “Saved Replies” feature to help us respond to FAQs more quickly. Plus, now that they’ve expanded their service to include live chat, it’s a tool we can rely on to scale with us as customer support needs and trends change.

Best Business Apps for Ecommerce #3: Beamer

This is probably one of our favorite tools we’ve added to our arsenal this year and one that we think so many different types of websites and online businesses can benefit from using. We use Beamer as an on-site newsfeed our visitors can go to see what’s new on the site — whether it’s new products, announcements, articles, or content of any kind. It’s particularly useful because it shows up as a subtle notification in our header menu so our visitors can access it anywhere on our site, no matter what page they land on.

This makes it easier for our audience to find what’s new on the site without having to search around for it, and it makes it makes it a more pleasant user experience for them too because we don’t have to use banners or pop-ups all the time to notify visitors of announcements.

For a glimpse into what Beamer looks like on our site and how we use it to drive traffic to different pages, check out our Beamer Review.

What We Love About Beamer

We love that it’s easy to update, simple for our visitors to check and its software is run off of our site so it doesn’t bog ours down and make it slower. Everything is stored off-site, so we don’t have to worry about it adding bulk to our existing backend or being slow to open because of all the content that’s on there. Plus, this was a service we were looking to implement on our site anyways and it’s a major bonus that we didn’t have to spend the time and money building it onto our own site! We just had to install it (which was super simple) and it was up and running on all pages really quickly.

Best Business Apps for Ecommerce #4: ProveSource

This is a new tool we’ve added within the last year and it’s one we’ve already seen a significant return on investment with. ProveSource adds social proof notifications to our site to give a visual representation of a busy store and to help our visitors discover more resources and content on our site.

This is one of those tools that pretty much any website can use because social proof is a huge traffic driver and a really powerful way to get customers to trust your brand. If you aren’t using social proof on your site already, we highly suggest implementing a business app like ProveSource so you can build that trust with your audience which will ultimately help you grow your sales.

What We Love About ProveSource

We’ve used similar sorts of tools in the past but nothing has come close to the kind of interaction we’ve received since we started using ProveSource. The ability to customize the notifications and add icons and GIFs to them is what makes them particularly engaging and we think it’s the reason why our visitors click on our notifications as often as they do.

Best Business Apps for Ecommerce #5: Sumo

No matter what your opinion is about pop-ups, they work. Because they work, we fully intend on using them on our website to help generate more leads and boost our email list. One of the best business apps we’ve come across to implement pop-ups on our site is Sumo and because they offer so many different pop-up options and other related tools, it’s a service we love using.

What We Love About Sumo

Sumo pop-ups are the most beautiful ones we’ve come across and we love that we can customize them to suit our own website’s branding. They’re another example of a tool that just works so we know we can just set up our pop-ups with Sumo and forget about them because we know they’re working. Plus, they offer all different types of pop-ups so if you don’t want to use one that takes up the whole screen and you’d rather use a sidebar scrolling box or a header banner, you can make that call. Check out our Sumo Review to get a full overview of all the different types of pop-ups they offer because it’s more than we’ve seen any other service offer.

Best Business Apps for Ecommerce #6: CloudApp

We’re a remote team like so many other ecommerce businesses, so online communication is really important for us. When we discovered CloudApp this year it was the kind of tool that we didn’t even know we needed but since we’ve been using it we’ve been happily surprised with how its features make working as a remote team more efficient.

We’ve included CloudApp as one of the best business apps we’ve used in the last year because it has changed the way we work online. It’s essentially a screen recording tool that enables you to take images and videos of your screen, but it offers a few more features that make it really useful.

First of all, the annotation feature is super useful for screenshots, to make notes on them or illustrate what you mean when giving feedback to your team. This is an especially useful tool to use when providing instructions or directions to someone and it makes much more sense to draw it out rather than writing it.

The screen recording tool is something we use to effectively communicate with our team if we want to connect with one another like we’re on a video call, but don’t actually have the time or scheduling compatibility to make that call happen. With CloudApp we can simply record a video of our screen and talk along with the recording then share it with our team members so they can review it.

We also use these features to communicate more clearly with our customers if they have a question that would be better served with a visual response (like if they need set up directions or installation instructions) and we find that we get a really positive reaction from them when we do this, even though it was an easier and more efficient method of communication for us!

What We Love About CloudApp

We love that CloudApp makes communication easier for us and our team and it’s the app we rely on when written communication just isn’t enough. It’s one of those business apps we’re super glad we have when it comes time to use it and it’s one we can see being part of our roster for a long time.

Best Business Apps for Ecommerce #7: ShortPixel

Making our site fast is super important to us, not only because it makes for a better user experience for our audience but because it helps boost our search engine optimization efforts. Part of what helps us make our site fast is optimizing our images to be as small as possible and ShortPixel is one of the best business apps we’ve discovered this year to help us do this.

What We Love About ShortPixel

We love ShortPixel because it does what it says it’s going to do: It reduces the file sizes of each image without actually impacting the quality so although our images still look great, they’ve actually been optimized within an inch of their life so they can load super fast.

ShortPixel offers options for how optimized you want your images to be — Lossy, Glossy and Lossless — so you can get the exact amount of optimization you’re looking for, tailor-made to each image.

It’s a super easy app to use and it’s really quick to jump onto their site, drag-and-drop an image file into their tool and then download the optimized image. For an even faster optimization method, they integrate into some ecommerce platforms so you can optimize the images that are already on your site which is useful if you have a bunch of un-optimized images on there.

Best Business Apps for Ecommerce #8: MissingLettr

We love business apps we can just set and forget and MissingLettr is one of those apps. When we discovered it this year, it was a major solution to the amount of time and energy we were spending on our social media content and one that we could see a lot of potential in. So far, after using it for several months, it has quickly become one of the best apps we’ve invested in and one we’d recommend to businesses looking to get more out of their social media without putting much more work in.

With MissingLettr we create year-long social media campaigns that post periodically throughout the year. Every time you set up a campaign, MissingLettr suggests images and copy to use in your posts which you have the option to edit or leave as is and then you can push the campaign to go live whenever you want and it will run throughout the whole year.

What We Love About MissingLettr

By creating a library of MissingLettr campaigns we’ve helped bulk up our social media without having to spend much — or any — time on it each day which is so useful for us. It takes a huge weight off our team knowing that our social media content is ready in the wings just waiting to go on and we’ve already done the work for the year ahead.

Best Business Apps for Ecommerce #9: SocialBee

This is a new app we’ve added this year but one we’re super interested to dive deeper into because it has all the features we really want in a social media management software.

Social media isn’t our main customer acquisition method so we’re constantly on the lookout for ways to make it easier, more efficient and just generally more effective for us to manage while still seeing some return on our investment. SocialBee has been that answer for us this year and we’re excited to see where it’s going to take us in the next year.

What we really need from our social media management tool, and what you might need from yours too, is something that handles a lot of the process for us so we don’t have to input so much time and energy into it. We want our brands to be active on social media but we don’t have the time or the team to be putting a significant amount of work into it so we need the tool to do a lot for us. We’re asking a lot, but SocialBee is built for that.

What We Love About SocialBee

What would have taken us several different social media tools before, we can now do all with SocialBee. We can add evergreen content to a library that recycles posts periodically throughout the year so content is always going out, we can automatically post content daily directly to all our social platforms so we don’t have to do it manually, and we can create and track custom URLs right within our dashboard. We love that there’s so much versatility and that it enables us to post our content how we want to and when we want to so we can grow more without working more.

Best Business Apps for Ecommerce #10: Mangools

This tool is pretty much our secret weapon and what we’ve relied on to bring us so much growth, not only in the last year but in the last five. It’s hands down one of the best business apps that we use and the one that we’d recommend getting if you can only commit to one from this list.

First of all, by signing up to Mangools you get access to all five of their tools which include:

KWFinder: Find the best keywords to target

SERPWatcher: Track your search engine ranking positions

SERPChecker: Analyze search engine ranking positions

LinkMiner: Discover backlink opportunities

SiteProfiler: Identify websites’ strengths and weaknesses

All of which are extremely valuable tools for any ecommerce business to use. We use the KWFinder and SERPWatcher tools the most (check out our KWFinder Review and SERPWatcher Review here to learn more about them) and they’re the foundational business apps we use to drive more traffic to our site. The insights they provide us are invaluable to our business and we wouldn’t be bringing in as much traffic as we do without them.

If your business relies on Search Engine Optimization or you want to improve your Search Engine Optimization, then the Mangools tools are definitely worth looking into. They offer incredible insights while also being easy to use and understand which makes them accessible to new entrepreneurs who don’t have experience with these types of tools.

What We Love About Mangools

Because we’ve had so much success using the Mangools tools for so many years, we trust anything their team comes out with. They often come out with new tools which we’re always really excited to explore because they work well and they offer an immense amount of value to our existing operations.

SEO is a big part of what we do, so their KWFinder tool is especially valuable to us and is something that we pretty much use daily. It’s one of the best keyword research tools available on the market and we highly recommend that all ecommerce entrepreneurs use it for their own businesses because it’s one of those apps that will help any online business boost their organic search traffic.

Conclusion

We love business apps so we try out a lot of them, but not all of them are worth writing home about. You see glimpses of our favorite apps here on the blog when we review them or recommend them in a blog post, but we wanted to round up our top ten best business apps we loved last year so you know what’s really worth trying out for your own business. These apps are game changers for us and we hope they will be for your business, too.